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Oligopsony comments on Factions, inequality, and social justice - Less Wrong
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Political egalitarianism tends to be concerned with socially contestible dimensions of power, rather than just the unequal distribution of anything that might make someone happy. This is why height isn't particularly politicized and the (hard) left tends to be hostile to charity or positive thinking.
Can you expand on this? I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Why should height not fall into a socially contestible form of power?
Well, there haven't been many situations where one's height was used as a basis for oppression. There may be some positive discrimination around height, inasmuch as height often correlates with other benefits -- but it's difficult to separate out all the confounds, and the biggest negative factor influencing it is simply health and adequate nutrition during childhood, which is so important that average adult height is used to calibrate standard-of-living and quality-of-life estimates. (While genetics can have major influence on height for individuals, it's also subject to regression toward the mean, resulting in it being a minor influence when taken statistically -- hormones are the other major, contributing biological factor). Basically, things have to be pretty bad somewhere, for populations to get strongly sorted out from each other by height. If you're on the negative end of an ingroup/outgroup height gap, you probably have bigger problems.
Put another way: nobody decided your name sounded too tall and refused to call you back for an interview, or invaded your country intending to civilize the shorties, because the variance on height is pretty continuous in most populations and the positive discrimination associated it does not form a clear signal disentangled from other life factors.
Yes, but how often does a short person once they get to an interview get less likely to be hired than a tall person? This is pretty hard to test, but the difficulty in detecting a form of discrimination doesn't make it not present.
Most of your reply doesn't seem to address whether this is really a socially contestible form of power, and in so far as these are valid questions, it looks like there are signs of discrimination. For example, there are scholarships that specifically are for tall people. Source. But there is no equivalent for short people.
Maybe I should start a short persons rights movements. Best way to measure success is how many discussions about correlated biological variables we render as completely mindkilling topics. The continuous nature of the distribution is a definite problem though.
Hm.
It is more than a bit disturbing to me how much this perspective appears to be absent from the analysis, and indeed, most such discussion threads about the subject.
It's kind scary when you realize these people are picturing Harrison Bergeron, the movie, not realizing that the original work was a parody of that mindset.
I suppose this is a bit of a sideline, but I was only able to identify Harrison Bergeron (the book; I haven't seen the movie) as satire by placing it in the context of Kurt Vonnegut's other works. It can be read as sincere on its own, if more than a bit heavy-handed.
Political empathy is hard, and the principles motivating a particular ideology - especially if the LW consensus that we underestimate individual variance in thinking styles is correct - can be frequently nonobvious. Factors exacerbating this include that persuasion of the uncommitted often proceeds "cynically," along appeal to values held by centers rather than tails, and that people seem predisposed to constructing the image of the enemy as a photo negative of themselves (or elsewise just incoherent and insane.)
Oftentimes, sea shifts in social values are driven by (as a necessary but insufficient condition) a disciplined ideological core with a coherent set of principles - consider feminism or what would be called neoliberalism. When successful such movements tend to be much more successful at popularizing object-level intuitions (even when grouped under vague headers like "freedom") than the framework that motivates them.
There's something to that, although I think LW's homogeneity matters here -- the aggregate impression LW leaves me as someone who lies outside most elements of the demographic core cluster is that most LWers live in a fairly similar bubble of ideas about the world, and have little idea what the world outside it is actually like, relying mostly on third-hand distillations of pop-sci for information about stuff beyond their areas of expertise.
Pragmatically, when it comes to social justice, LWers in general also seem to be allergic to history -- this post is a good example; the author is talking about the "How come equality" thing (regarding race in a US context, say) and all I can think is "Well, it may have something to do with how a buncha Europeans decided to declare each other off-limits for slavery, created the very modern idea of race to justify it, stole land, stole people, used pretty much everybody else to build a country on the cheap, and used it to create a game rigged in their favor." That's essentially what anti-racists in the US are on about -- they want to de-rig the game or to have viable alternatives to participating in it -- but here I see people speculating about which evopsych dynamics explain the ostensible desire for equality.
I'm all for intellectual curiosity unrestrained by social fashions, but this is not a big mystery. It's just something LW in aggregate knows very little about. The answer is both more simple (in terms of how hard you'd have to work to render it legible to a lay person) and more complex (in terms of the actual underlying process) than that.
I haven't commented directly to the post because it seemed weirdly abstract to me.
It might be worth looking at when inequality is used as a basis for change, as distinct from "we're us! and we ought to be in charge!" (possibly more useful for coups than revolutions) or "we're wonderful! and we've been mistreated! we ought to be in charge!".
I think you vastly overestimate the prevalence and credibility of "...and we ought to be in charge!", and the fact that I've unpacked this specifically as "We want to unrig the game, or be able to ignore you when you play it" in the post above makes me wonder if you concretely realize and/or believe this.
Do you think anti-racists primarily want to replace a white-centric society with a <some other group>-centric one that otherwise looks the same? Do you think this is a significant subset of anti-racist movements? If so, why?
I haven't studied anti-racists in general. I've seen some trends I don't like (setting up prejudice against white people in general and white men in particular, claiming that the pain unprivileged people feel must always trump the pain they cause to privileged people-- I get especially suspicious if that's accompanied by being enthusiastic about eventually getting a demographic win), but I don't know whether that sort of thing will turn out to be the major result of anti-racism.
I've seen some moderation of the excesses I saw during RaceFail (less "Educate yourself!" as educational materials were developed, more realization that allies are useful for talking with people in their own groups who don't listen to Others, and less of a habit of dumping rage). I honestly don't know what the long run is going to look like.
The weird thing is, when I posted about "we ought to be in charge!" I was thinking about people who aren't anti-racists-- in fact I very specifically had Nazis in mind for the second bunch, and was just being a bit coy.
The general trend of my thinking (the question was pretty fuzzy at my end, which may explain part of why my comment seems to have been a Rorschach blot) was to wonder whether there'd been a historical shift in the reasons for trying to change hierarchies.
Some of them would like to see a Brahmin-centric society. A society where being black isn't a reason to deny a person a prestigious job, but speaking incorrect thoughts is. (The second link is not about racism, but the concept is similar.)
I am not sure how to estimate the number of such people. Also, some people in the movement are leaders and some are followers, so it would be important to know the number among leaders.
So he said something empirically true as far as he could tell ("there is research indicating...") but connotationally-loaded (the equivalent of a statement like "All Jews are apes"), in a public forum (billing it as "an attempt at provocation" no less). At best, it's inept communication; at worst it's deliberate shit-stirring and then as a result...
What, people got angry at him? And it didn't come to much except that there were some people angry at him? Seriously, look at what happened in this article you're citing. The guy got a large number of people griping his direction, a lot of support, not even the administrative equivalent of a slap on the wrist, and Stephen Pinker passionately defending him with confused comments about "the difference between a university and a madrassa" (protip, Pinker: a university is a madrassa, because madrassa means "school.")
All of this, while also being implicated in a conflict of interest scandal, and losing the university lots of money on derivates? This is simply amazing job protection. It's not like he was removed forcibly from his position -- the guy resigned a year later, with a year's paid sabbatical and a university-subsidized million-dollar loan on his house! Whereupon he was immediately given a prestigious position as professor at another university and management over a hedge fund, and even put onto the National Economic Council until more conflicts of interest did him in.
This is your example of the PC brigade denying someone a job?
I'm pretty sure Pinker was aware of that. He's relying on the connotations of words. His point (which seems valid) is that the ideal of a university as it is commonly understood allows more free inquiry and statements that may turn out to be wrong, as opposed to for example an institution which has a large amount of theological dictation about what may be studied or proposed.
(For what it is worth, I think almost everything that Summers said was wrong, and is demonstrably wrong given the differences between American and Western European university demographics, but it does seem like he was attacked in an essentially ideological fashion.)
Edit: I do however agree with a fair bit of your analysis, I think that what happened to Summers was to a large extent connected to other ongoing problems, and is in many ways pretty removed from any strong notion of censorship. There were a lot of problems with his administration and focusing purely on these comments misses how many things were going wrong, and misses how he was in practice actually treated.
Really? I doubt most Anglophones, even educated ones, know that -- certainly the way the term is bandied about in the English-speaking press as though it were synonymous with "Extreme Islamist Indoctrination Centre" would make me guess that he's less likely to be aware of that; it seems like very few people I hear using the term that way realize that a madrassa is often explicitly secular.
Also, my feeling is that big social changes are twenty years or more in the future, and highly dependent on decisions that haven't been made yet.